Hanging from the ceiling on the left is the Spirit of St. Louis airplane that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. That was the first solo flight by man across the ocean from one continent to another. Lindbergh's flight took place just 24 years after the Wright Brothers accomplished the first successful flight of a manned aircraft in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Those two events marked the beginning of air travel that people all around the world take for granted today. It started in the US.
Below Lindbergh's plane in the photo above is the Apollo 11 Command module used in the first landing of humans on the moon in 1969. This NASA mission took place just 42 years after Lindbergh's flight and was followed by five more successful manned moon landings carried out by the US space agency and its outstanding astronauts.
With the end of the Space Shuttle program coming soon, NASA is working on a new type of spacecraft to replace it, but, in the meantime, the US for the first time in history will have to rely on another country, Russia, to take its astronauts to the Space Station when needed. It is encouraging that the US and Russia have reached a point in their relations that such cooperative missions can be carried out to pursue mankind's exploration of the universe.
Private enterprise is also now positioned to play a larger role in future space travel. The space vehicle hanging to the right of the Spirit of St. Louis is SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded spaceplane to complete a manned space flight. This historic spaceplane was flown by the first commercially licensed space pilot (Mike Melvill) in 2004.... just a few months after the centennial of the Wright Brothers' first flight. The SpaceShipOne flight started at the first facility in the US licensed for commercial space flights by the FAA: the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California.
Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group has entered into a joint venture with the company (Scaled Composites founded by Burt Rutan and financed by Paul Allen) that developed SpaceShipOne to create a spaceliner for commercial flights. The new joint venture is called Virgin Galactic and is likely to fly from Mojave Air and Space Port.
While air and space travel is now very much an international endeavor (much as Gene Roddenberry envisioned in the Star Trek series decades ago), Americans have played a major role in the progress to this point in history. Americans have made these major contributions to air and space travel through both personal inspiration, skill, perseverance and financial support, such as the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Burt Rutan and Paul Allen have done, and through US government and military contributions, most notably demonstrated in the NASA missions over the past fifty years.
Now look at this photo from space of London at night and think about the American ingenuity and genius that contributed to the lights that can be seen from Space Shuttles and the International Space Station. 
Thomas Edison, a man who demonstrates the unique quality and character of those who pursue the American Dream, worked for years to develop a successful practical light bulb, and then developed the electric utility systems (generating stations, community wiring and lighting installations) that led to the creation of the Edison electric utility companies around the country that we all take for granted whenever we flip a light switch.
Many inventors around the world had been working to develop a durable light bulb for most of the 19th Century. And even though an Englishman (Sir Joseph Swan) actually invented a light bulb that became the first type installed throughout an entire public building (the Savoy Theater in London when it opened in 1881), Edison's genius went beyond the light bulb itself to creating the companies that built the infrastructure to allow whole cities to be lit up at night.
Although Swan formed his own company in England to sell his light bulbs, by 1883, Edison and Swan merged their companies to manufacture light bulbs for sale in the UK. After Edison founded General Electric in 1890, GE worked or competed with other electrical generation companies around the world through the early years of the 20th Century that resulted in the global daily use of electricity for, not only artificial light, but also a multitude of other electrically powered devices, including appliances, medical equipment, machinery and the modern versions of other Edison inventions (such as the phonograph, sound recording devices and motion picture equipment). The benefits to mankind are countless.
What other country in the world could be the home of so many transformative pioneers, such as the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison, who had the freedom, intellectual insight and entrepreneurial spirit to develop their ideas into working products that grew into major new industries that changed the way men, women and children around the globe live, work and play in their daily lives?
The system of government that resulted from the Revolution started on July 4, 1776 has certainly created a place that can inspire great dreams and accomplishments. It's something for which all Americans can be proud, including immigrants who move to America and become US citizens in order to pursue their own dreams, just as pioneer commercial astronaut Mike Melvill from South Africa did before he flew SpaceShipOne over the Mojave desert.
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